July 2010

ShareMyPlaylists.com provides us with another in their series of excellent playlist posts. You can check out thousands of playlists at ShareMyPlaylists.com – they’ve got a little something for everyone.

Strictly BASS… Part Five
We hit the ground running this month with the latest in this brilliant series of bulky bass line inspired playlists from syknyk. This month’s the tunes playing havoc with you boom box include Radio 1’s Toddla T, dubstep producer de jour Rusko and Boy 8-Bit.

Undiscovered Prince
The Purple One is back with a new album, 20Ten, which he once again decided to give away for free in some daily rag or other, and to celebrate SMP’s head honcho kieron has put together this brilliant playlist which, in his own words, is “dedicated to some of the best tracks to come out of Paisley Park over the years.” A must for all Prince fans featuring album tracks, remixes and B-sides.

A Song A Day 2010
This is a great concept for a playlist which, as the name suggests, features a song added every day during 2010. Click here for a song to suit every mood. Is your boss giving you trouble? Morrissey – Little Man, What Now? Girlfriend just dumped you? Sinead O’Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U. Do you think you left the iron on at home? Beck – It’s All In Your Mind.

We’ve been fans of Facebook for a long time now, so much so that we looked to them for inspiration when building our own social features.

Yesterday they reached a big milestone, 500 million users, and to celebrate they’re collecting stories from their users and asking which ones inspire them. We’re happy to take a small part in this and we’re asking our users to share their music stories with the new Stories tab on our Facebook page.

So if you’ve found a new favourite band after seeing them in your friend’s top artists, attended an amazing festival or maybe you even found love after someone dropped a track in your Spotify inbox – please feel free to share the story.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

As a preview release this version is still unsupported, but we’re running it ourselves and will try to make sure it keeps pace with its Mac and Windows siblings. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

So how do you get it? Head over to our preview page where we’ve packaged the first release as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and please keep the feedback coming!

UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers.

After two hugely acclaimed albums (2005’s ‘Arular’ and 2007’s ‘Kala’), the global success of Paper Planes, Oscar nominations, and that ’Grammys performance, M.I.A is set to release new album ‘///Y/’, which sees her as incendiary and forward thinking as ever.

Recorded in Los Angeles, the album features production from Rusko, Diplo, Blaqstarr and Switch, a collaboration resulting in dubstep bass and grinding industrial noise being added to MIA’s unique armoury of sounds. ‘///Y/’, draws influence from our technologically changing world, now that our every thought and action is documented and posted for everyone to see. The album is an uncensored screen-grab of 2010.

On the 8th of July at Stångbro in Linköping, Lars Winnerbäck will kick off his 2010 summer tour and he’ll also be releasing a new DVD containing video from one of his shows at Hovet in December 2009. Today, Spotify listeners can watch exclusive outtakes from the DVD.

For his tour Lasse has invited Melissa Horn, Laleh, Dundertåget, Ane Brun, Sophie Zelmani and
Love Antell to perform on one of his two stages. For more information about the summertour and to see which artist that will perform at each show go to www.winnerbäck.se

Mark Ronson will be performing brand new tracks from his forthcoming album ‘Record Collection’ (out 27th September) at an intimate London show this Tuesday (6th July)! Spotify has three pairs of tickets for Premium members up for grabs! For your chance to attend this special event simply reply to this post and tell us your favourite three albums in your Spotify record collection.

Easily the most requested feature for our iPhone app since it launched last September has been the ability to listen to music while surfing the web, using Facebook, etc. Up until now this hasn’t been possible but with Apple’s release of iOS 4 you’re able to use multiple apps at the same time, including Spotify.

Along with this great feature we managed to squeeze in a few more nice additions into this update, the full release contains: